Following the Second World War, a re-examination of the animal as acategory of ontological being by Heidegger, Levinas and Derrida pushedthis question of philosophical theory out of its academic margin.Moreover, North America's ecocritical movement has produced anincreasingly visible body of work. Nevertheless, the politics of animalrepresentation remains quite underdeveloped in both literary theory andcriticism. This panel will take submissions on literary works thatreconsider how representations of animals function in terms of theirpolitics, how different types of representations may not work toencourage or resist appropriation as metaphors, and in particular, howthese works might rearticulate other questions of race, gender andtransnationlism along the lines of species.